


What's in a Name?

by Mustachebabs



Series: Sleepaway 2020 Run [6]
Category: Sleepaway (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen, character musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mustachebabs/pseuds/Mustachebabs
Summary: Hollow and Howling kind of rhyme, don't you think?
Series: Sleepaway 2020 Run [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1886551
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: Camp Howling Ground (Sleepaway 2020 campaign)





	What's in a Name?

Throughout her years at camp, something happens to her name.

_Penny_ stops feeling right. At first it’s gradual, like a small cut you don’t remember how you got. 

Others use it to address her and at first, she thinks it’s growth. Camp has no shortage of self-discovery opportunities and not even she’s safe from it. 

Maybe her new name would come to her. 

Instead, responsibilities come. When she goes home from camp, her chores and school expectations nearly double. Still, she pushes through and returns to camp the next summer. 

Camp takes the letters and makes them illegible as she grows up. 

Every time someone calls out for her, it feels like being slowly buried with gravel. She can still hear it and recognize it as her name, but it sounds like there’s interference in between.

That year they paint rocks with all their names to leave at the shores of the lake, she instead draws a flower as a placeholder.

She’s matured out of it, she tells herself when she becomes a wolf. 

It hardly sounds as her own during introductions now. She manages to not think about it and keeps to herself, takes part in group camp activities and doesn’t ask many questions. 

When it’s inevitable and someone calls for her across the fields, it feels like being dropped into a pool of freezing water.

Still she answers to it for the last few years. Everyone else’s changes seem to help their happiness, but for her it means more things to worry about. 

Even camp starts to offload its needs onto her. She accepts this, of course. Why else would they do so if it wasn’t because she could handle it? 

When she finally returns as a counselor, she introduces herself as _Penelope_. It feels like a rock in her stomach, but she considers it an anchor.

Before then it had only been used beyond campgrounds and that first night at the bonfire, she can feel shadows creep through the syllables every time a camper asks her something.

The camp may take her name, but she can still defend campers with her body.

**Author's Note:**

> It's a small miracle this didn't turn into some sort of acronym fic, are those still a thing?


End file.
